What Tiffany ran was a machine that looked for women at the exact moment I was standing in front of her — pregnant, newly abandoned, broke, frightened, buried in someone else’s debt — and it applied pressure to precisely those wounds until the woman signed.

The medical file exaggerated to frighten.

The gentle voice explaining, so reasonably, that a woman in your circumstances simply cannot manage a child.

The forms already filled out and waiting, the pen already uncapped, the placement already arranged with a family who would pay handsomely and never know that the mother had been steered rather than freed.

And the fee, skimmed quietly off the top, that made the whole tender performance profitable.

She was not in the business of finding homes for children who needed them.